AMERICA SHIFTS GEAR FOR WAR ON IRAN

America’s war plans for full spectrum dominance in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asian region shifted up a gear this week with three significant and inter-related developments.

Forget about viewing events in countries as separate incidents. Syria, Iran and the Gulf monarchies are closely bound up in US-led war plans in the Middle East that are aimed at projecting American political, economic and military power across this vital region and beyond. Events today are but a continuum with US wars of conquest in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Libya as part of an unfolding agenda for hegemony.

First, this week it emerged that the purported Kofi Annan Peace Plan is all but dead. For the past four weeks, the US-led foreign powers have done everything to make sure the supposed peace plan would fail, from Western governments and media constantly excoriating Syrian President Bashar Al Assad for allegedly not abiding by the ceasefire, while these same powers have assiduously supported mercenary groups to go on a full terror assault involving no-warning car bombs and shootings.

US officials are not yet declaring the Annan ceasefire over, but actions on the ground speak volumes. An influx of more powerful weaponry is reported to now have reached the so-called Syrian rebels. The mercenaries trying to topple the Assad government are largely foreign jihadist elements from Libya, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In weeks prior to the 12 April ceasefire, the Syrian government forces were gaining the upperhand, routing these armed groups from their base in the city of Homs.

Under the strictures of the ceasefire, which were tightly and unilaterally applied by Western governments and media to the conduct of the Syrian army, the armed opposition groups appear to have taken advantage of the respite to inflict their worse and to reorganise. Two massive car bombs in the capital, Damascus, on 10 May killed 55 and injured more than 400. The blasts were so powerful they left two large craters in the roads.

This week the foreign-backed mercenaries were reported to have killed 23 Syrian army troops in the town of Rastan, near Homs. The surge in deaths among civilians and security forces reflects the increased firepower that is now making its way into the hands of the mercenaries.

According to the Washington Post, the Gulf monarchies, mainly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are financing the new shipments of weapons. This is drawn from the war-chest of $100 million that was pledged by the US-backed Arab autocrats at the conference in Istanbul at the beginning of April. Officially, the Obama administration is maintaining a cynical fiction that it is only supplying “non-lethal material” to the Syrian armed groups. But it is the US that is now assuming the crucial lead role of overseeing the distribution and deployment of new weapons flowing into Syria.

“The US contacts with the rebel military and the information-sharing with Gulf nations mark a shift in Obama administration policy as hopes [sic] dim for a political solution to the Syrian crisis. Many officials now consider an expanding military confrontation to be inevitable,” reports the Washington Post on the 16 May.